Your footy tipping competition just finished. Your group chat didn't.

Guide

Grand Final week ends the season, not the group. The fourteen people who spent five months arguing about tips in the competition chat are still there on Monday morning. They just don’t have anything to tip.

If you’ve never run one, a tipping competition is simple. Everyone picks who they think will win. The app keeps score. Whoever gets the most right, wins. The picks were never really the point, though. The point was fourteen people who had agreed to care about the same result every weekend, and who therefore had a reason to message each other on Monday. That part has no end date. Only the fixture does.

Which is why the end of the footy season is the moment TippingMates is built for a second time in the same year. This year the NBL tipped off on 19 September, a week before the AFL Grand Final was played on 26 September. The English Premier League and La Liga never stopped. The NFL is already weeks in. Same group, same habit, different ball.

What’s on over summer, and how long each season runs

The useful thing about the summer slate is that it isn’t one season. It’s several, of different lengths, so the group can pick a shape that suits it.

NBL runs through to March 2027. It’s the natural next step for an office that already argues about basketball, and its rounds look different from a footy round, which we’ve written about in why the NBL season is a different shape.
NFL runs to February 2027. A game-a-week rhythm that lands on Monday morning Australian time, which suits a group that liked tipping on a Sunday night.
English Premier League, La Liga and A-League Men run to May 2027. These are the long ones. If your group wants something that lasts right up until the AFL and NRL come back, football is it.
WBBL | 12 runs from 29 October to 5 December. Five and a bit weeks, eight clubs, and a good fit for a family group across the last stretch of the school year. There’s a club-by-club guide in WBBL season 12: eight clubs, eight stories.
AFLW runs to 27 November, with finals from 6 November. If your group wants to stay with Australian rules, the women’s season carries you most of the way to Christmas.
Nepal Premier League, the T20 cricket competition, runs from 26 October to 21 November. Short, sharp, and the obvious choice for a group that follows Nepali cricket.

The tournaments page lists everything you can tip on right now and how far along each season is. You can start from the next round of any live season, so a group that decides in week six isn’t locked out of anything. It just starts in week seven.

The five-minute version: starting the next tipping competition

You don’t need everyone to remember how they signed up the first time. Their account is still there, and so is yours.

Start a new competition on whichever sport you’re moving to. Pick the league, give it a name the group will recognise (“Accounts NBL” works better than “Competition 2”), and you’re the owner. If someone else did the invites last time, make them a co-owner so the job stays shared.
Invite the same people. The fastest way for a club or office-sized group is the competition’s own join code or QR code. Show it once at the next thing you’re all at anyway, or drop it in the group chat you already use. Anyone whose email matches an invite you send is in straight away; anyone else requests to join and you approve them from the same screen you already know. Sign-in is a six-digit code sent to their email, or Sign in with Apple or Google, so the whole thing takes about as long as reading this paragraph.
Tips lock the way they always did: five minutes before each game starts, on the server clock, for everyone at once. Then everyone’s picks are revealed. The ladder updates itself as results come in, the round winner is shown, and the reminder before a round locks still arrives.

One more thing worth doing in that first five minutes: post once on the new competition’s board. The owner can post announcements, and a short one (“same crew, different ball, first game locks Friday night”) does three jobs at once. It tells people the competition is real, it tells them when the first tip is due, and it gives the people who haven’t joined yet something to see when they do. Members can react and comment on it, so the first bit of banter usually arrives before the first result does.

A new competition starts its ladder fresh. That’s either a clean slate or the chance to finally finish ahead of the person who won last time, depending on how your group is wired. If you’re joining a season part-way through and want the earlier rounds to count, you can import them: each member’s tips as a CSV, or an opening balance of points. It’s the same path a group uses when it moves across from a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet migration checklist walks through it step by step.

What changes when the ball changes

The mechanics carry over. A few details are worth telling the group before round one, because they’re the things people ask about on Monday.

Draws exist now. In football, a drawn match is a real result, and the scoring treats it as one: everyone who tipped that game gets 1 point for a draw, against the usual 2 for a correct tip. The draw is scored, not ignored, and it’s scored the same for everyone. Say that once in the board announcement and you’ll save yourself six messages in November.

Lockout is per game, not per round. It always was, but it matters more in sports with games spread across several days and, for the overseas leagues, across the night. Each game locks five minutes before it starts, so a tip for Sunday’s game can still go in on Sunday. A missed game is simply 0 for that game, and the rest of the round is still yours to tip. You stay in, and the ladder carries on.

Rounds are a different size. A footy round was eight or nine games. An NFL week is more; a WBBL round is fewer; a T20 league packs its games into a few weeks. The scoring rules are visible to every member, and the owner can set different weights for particular rounds (finals, for instance) and override the points on an individual game if a fixture is postponed or abandoned. If your group liked a feature game, you can nominate one in a round with a bonus for the exact score or margin.

The quiet weeks look different. Footy had byes; football pauses for international breaks; a short cricket season has none at all. The in-app inbox and push reminders still point at the round about to lock, and the owner can nudge whoever hasn’t tipped yet, which does most of the chasing for you. Each member also has a round-by-round history, so when someone comes back from a quiet fortnight they can see exactly where they stand and what the rest of the group did while they were away.

Time zones. If the group is tipping the Nepal Premier League or the EPL, some games start late at night in Australia. Lockout follows the game’s actual start time, on the server clock, so the only thing to agree on is that nobody gets to argue about it.

Why bother, instead of letting it lapse

Because the thing that made your competition work was never the sport. It was fourteen people who had already agreed to care about the same result every week. That’s the hard part, and you already have it. Starting the next competition costs you the five minutes above. Starting from nothing costs you re-recruiting the whole group in March, one at a time, when half of them have forgotten they enjoyed it.

Adult friendships don’t come with a built-in reason to talk every Thursday. A tipping competition is one. Every round quietly says: we’re still doing this. Keep it going over summer and the group gets a second season of the stuff that actually mattered. The absurd pick that came off. The week everyone got the same game wrong. The person at the bottom of the ladder who nobody expected to see there, and who has opinions about it.

Two things in the app are built for exactly this moment. The board from the finished competition stays open after the season ends, so the Grand Final argument can keep going while the new ladder gets started. And when a season ends, the group can roll over into the next season’s competition with the same members, so when the AFL and NRL return for 2027 the people are already in the room. Summer is the bridge between the two.

There’s a quieter reason too. A second sport changes who’s good. The person who topped the footy ladder on the strength of thirty years of Saturday afternoons has no particular advantage in the NBL. The quiet one in the group who grew up on basketball, or whose cousin plays in Kathmandu, suddenly does. A second sport reshuffles the group a little, and a reshuffled group has more to talk about.

Picking the sport your group will actually stick with

The temptation is to pick the biggest league. The better rule is to pick the one the group will still be tipping in the fourth week.

Follow the people, not the fixture. If three of the fourteen already watch the NBL, start there, even if the NFL has more games. Three people who care will bring the other eleven along. A league nobody follows brings nobody.

Shorter can be better. A group coming off a long footy season sometimes wants a five-week competition more than a seven-month one. WBBL | 12 or the Nepal Premier League gets you to December with a winner and a reason to do another one in the new year. You can always start a second competition when the first ends, with the same code-and-approve routine and the same group.

Let people try a round first. On any tournament page in the app or on the website, anyone can pick a round and see how the scoring works before they sign up. If you’re unsure whether the office will take to basketball, send that page to the three sceptics and see whether they tip it.

It’s fine if fewer come across. A footy competition of fourteen that becomes a summer competition of eight is a success. It’s eight people who want to keep going, and the other six will see the Monday messages and wander back in for the next one. The join code works all season.

One competition at a time, unless the group asks for two. It’s tempting to launch NBL and EPL in the same week. One competition the whole group tips is worth more than two that half of it ignores. If there’s genuine appetite for both, the second can start from the next round whenever you like.

The sport will change again in March, and the group will still be there. A TippingMates competition is free for the whole group, so the only thing the summer one asks of anyone is a pick before each game and a bit of opinion afterwards. If your footy tipping competition finished and the group chat didn’t, you already have everything you need to start the next one.